“Fuck.”
CHAPTER36
MEGHAN
Chaos has broken out all around me, and my head is killing me from where I hit it on the floor, but from the moment the gunshots rang out, I became wide awake and alert, realizing I need to do everything I can to help get Hunter and myself out of this alive.
When he took off across the room to go after that guy in the back, I picked up a piece of wood from the floor, a fragment from all of the destruction Mr. Nyx and his friends had caused to my once lovely apartment. It was hard to even know what I’m doing without being able to see, but then Ethan is suddenly there out of nowhere. “You okay, Meghan?” he asks while he’s trying to shoot at the bad guys. From the sounds of it, more of them have come in the door.
“I’m just great, Ethan. How are you?” I asked him sarcastically as I whittle away at the zip ties that hold my hands around the back of the chair. The wood isn’t quite sharp enough. “Do you happen to have a knife?” I ask him. “Or do you suppose you could grab one out of that drawer over there by the stove?”
“Uhm… I’m trying to kill these mobsters right now,” he says. “But how about a nail?” I feel his hand brush against my palm, and then a piece of metal drops into my hand, and I try using that to get my wrists free.
It takes a few minutes for me to finally break through the restraints. Ethan helps the best he can, but he’s been so busy shooting all of these awful people all around us that I have to do much of it myself.
Finally, I feel the plastic begin to give way, and then, suddenly, my wrists snap apart. My hands are sore from all of the sawing against the zip tie with the wood and then the nail, and my wrists are aching from the strain, but once I’m free, I’m bound and determined to do everything I can to help the situation. We need to get out of here as soon as possible.
I pop my head around the side of the island just in time to see Hunter take out some crazy-ass bitch who definitely hadn’t been here before. It makes me wonder how many fucking people Mr. Nyx brought with him to look for this alleged cash. I was unconscious for a lot of the time I was tied to the chair, but I only saw three or four different guys.
As I peer around the kitchen island at my destroyed apartment, I see a lot of dead bodies, and one of them is lying pretty close to where Ethan is next to the kitchen island, his large body only partially blocked by what is left of the splintered wood. He’s watching what’s happening with Hunter very closely, and I imagine it is so that he can do his best to keep his boss from getting shot.
Thoughts of what would happen if Hunter dies in my apartment makes my eyes misty. I wish I could be of better service, but I don’t even have a gun with me, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to use it. I’d fired a rifle a few times back home because my grandpa used to take me hunting every once in a while when I was younger. It was one of the few things we could do to entertain ourselves where I’d grown up. But…that is far different from the handguns these people are using.
As I sit here on my knees, watching the fight, I notice something peculiar about the island. The assholes who’d ruined my apartment had taken the trim off of the bottom of the island so they could get the floorboards off more easily. I always thought this island was built pretty solidly, and that it had probably always been in the apartment, even though the kitchen is a little small for such a large piece of furniture. But then, as I watchi the fight unfold, I notice something strange about it.
It isn’t actually attached to the floor. It had just been sitting there with the trim around it, like someone had just plunked it down there. I think it’s bizarre and am about to investigate the situation when the goon Hunter had shot falls next to Ethan and me had managed to get back to his feet.
Ethan is shooting at Mr. Nyx as Hunter storms over toward him, which almost makes me scream, but then, this guy gets up, and Ethan’s attention is drawn away from the battle near the couch. He shoots at the guy again, but he lunges at Ethan, and they both fell onto the kitchen floor right near me.
I let out a loud yelp and scoot around toward the other side of the island. When I do so, the island shifts and slides across the floor a bit, and I move back with it.
Ethan picks up one of the wooden floor pieces with a nail sticking out of it and clubs the guy in the head. Immediately, blood spurts everywhere, and I cover my mouth with both hands to stifle a scream. That and the gunshot wounds the man had already suffered earlier seem to be about all he can take, and he falls over to the side, landing in a heap.
“Fuck,” Ethan mutters, and then he picks his gun up and aims it where Hunter and Mr. Nyx are fighting, but he doesn’t fire, and I suppose that’s because Hunter and Mr. Nyx are too close to one another, and Ethan might shoot Hunter accidentally.
My eyes are drawn to Hunter as he kneels on the floor, straddling Mr. Nyx and punching the shit out of him. Over and over again, Hunter pounds the older guy in the face and in the trunk with both of his fists. I watch in awe, wondering at myself how I can find something like this so attractive when Hunter is doing his best to murder his enemy with his fists, but I don’t have time to ponder it too much. I’m too busy trying to think of another way to get out of the situation.
And then… I look down at the floor near the island and notice something strange about the pieces of wood there. They are a different color than the rest of the floor, like they’d been installed more recently. I think that’s odd. So I pick up a shard of wood and use it to pry one of these newer pieces up out of the floor. I toss that one aside and lift another one.
That’s when my eyes settle on the most peculiar thing I’ve ever seen in a floor before. It’s a large, gray duffle bag, and it’s been wedged deep in the floorboards. I take a moment to consider what I’m seeing. The whole thing seems so strange.
Even with all of the commotion going on around me, I manage to realize what it is. I almost laugh with glee as I reach down to grab the bag.
That’s when I fuck up.
“Hunter!” I yell. “I found it!”
But he doesn’t hear the rest of what I say because after I pull the bag out of the floorboards, I turn to see that my shout of joy has been too much of a distraction, and now, I have this duffle bag in my hand, and I’m leaping up off of the floor as Ethan runs around the other side of the island in an attempt to get to Hunter, who is passed out on the ground, and Mr. Nyx is coming at me.
“Fuck.” It is the only word that will come out of my mouth. He looks like a fucking nightmare. His face is all caved in, bloodied, bruised, misshapen. One of his eyes is just a slit, and the other one is bleeding. Actual drops of blood are pouring out his fucking eyeball!
But this rat bastard is determined, and as he comes toward me, I know what he intends to do. He wants this money, and he will stop at nothing to get it.
I am not about to just hand it over, though. It’s so fucking heavy, I can barely lift it, especially since my body hurts so badly from everything I’ve been through, but as the Frankenstein monster lunges at me, I grab the handles with both of my fists and bring it around in an arc as fast as I can.
The bag hits Mr. Nyx on the side of his bloodied head, and his body topples over. He crumples to the ground, falling on the ripped-up floor near the island, his left arm landing on the chair I was just tied to. Ironically, they’d been ripping up the entire goddamn apartment complex looking for this bag of money, and it had been less than two feet from me the whole time. It had been right under their noses!
I’ll have to think about that later, though. Just because all of the bad guys are out cold at the moment doesn’t mean they’ll stay down. Even now, I see that Mr. Nyx is stirring again. I think Ethan is preoccupied with another one of the assholes, so I try to move away from Mr. Nyx, thinking I should just take my giant bag of money and run out the door.